A teacher comes across from the school to greet Obi, and he walks on up with them to the village where the children from higher up stay for school. The first of the mountain villages.

‘Was this village here when I came before?’ Jericho asks. He has no memory of it.

‘It was small then. Now it is bigger. You and Leonard walked to the next village.’

‘Above the waterfall?’

‘The same,’ Obi says. ‘Tonight we stop here.’

He looks up, towards the rain clouds gathering ahead. Most of the others have gone on, taking the kago with them. There’ll be no sleeping bag for Jericho tonight, no camping mat, no mosquito net. But a few have waited, and men from the village are gathered to greet him; the atmosphere is almost festive. The women are cooking on the fire, they dry his socks, and the night proves not so bad. The schoolteacher has a guitar, the village men talk, a river of sound in the heart language he once knew, and after that walk Jericho could sleep anywhere. He dreams of blind pigs. It’s a story Leonard and Rika both tell. A set piece, a reminder that darkness can lie side by side with beauty.

At dawn the next morning, after a quick meal of cold sweet potato, they say goodbye to the teacher, shake hands with the women, and are on the road again, accompanied by some of the men from the village. They are carrying their kundu drums and feathers. Jericho’s feet are sore. He is stiff and tired. Mountain man, what a joke. Following Obi, he thinks of Rika climbing up to tell Leonard she was leaving, breaking his heart. Yes, she broke his heart, Leonard never tried to conceal it, but a broken heart is not such a bad thing, he’d say, it means you have loved; the parts can reassemble, and in the cracks and breaks we reshape ourselves. ‘No, I don’t blame her. I regret every day I didn’t spend with her, but I don’t blame her. I regret nothing of the changes it brought – how could I, when it brought me you?’

All this Leonard says, speaking in Jericho’s head, his voice keeping time with the rhythm of his feet as he climbs. And all the while the great trees rise up and through the high canopy, wisps of cloud over a pale sky. This is the land he was born to, alive in his dreams, and here he is, returning as a stranger who cannot find the path to bring himself home.

He walks on, ceasing to think, and when he has given up all expectation of arriving anywhere, ever, they come down the ridge to the river beneath the village. Through the trees, he can see sun playing on the water, women washing vegetables and babies sleeping in bilums hanging from low branches. Young boys come splashing over to greet them and, without pausing, Obi runs up the waterfall path to the village. Jericho crosses the river, sits gasping on a rock in the sun, shaking hands, laughing, remembering. Yes, he remembers this river from last time, and climbing up the rocks with the boys. ‘Is the pool still there?’ he asks the children who crowd around. ‘Big pool,’ they say. ‘We take you.’ Later. Later. The women have gone up the path, calling the children to walk with him. Jericho lets them gather him up, show him the path, how to keep his step on a waterfall. Halfway up, when he hears the drums, each with its own voice, something moves low down inside him. At the top, where the ridge flattens out, they are in an ordered world of paths and hedges, planted gardens. Just as in Leonard’s film, though it was black and white, and this is fauve-ish in its colour, vivid after sombre hours beneath the forest canopy. All around he sees flowers, and trees laden with fruit.